"Courts handed victories to gay-marriage opponents in two states Friday, reinstating Nebraska's voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage and throwing out an attempt to keep a proposed ban off the ballot in Tennessee.

In the Nebraska case, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a judge's ruling last year that the ban was too broad and deprived gays and lesbians of participation in the political process, among other things. Seventy percent of voters approved the ban as a constitutional amendment in 2000.

It went further than similar bans in many states in that it also barred same-sex couples from many legal protections afforded to heterosexual couples. For example, the partners of gays and lesbians who work for the state are not entitled to share their health insurance and other benefits.

"Less than a week after New York's highest court ruled that denying same-sex couples the right to marry did not violate the State Constitution, a lower court on Long Island denied health benefits yesterday to the partner of a Uniondale man.

In his ruling, a State Supreme Court justice in Mineola said that even though they had wed two years ago in Canada, the men's marriage was not recognized by the state. The decision was the first by a New York Court to refer directly to last week's watershed decision by the New York Court of Appeals. The appellate court, by a 4-to-2 majority, found that in laws dating back nearly 100 years, the State Legislature had intended to limit marriage to a union between a man and a woman, and that lawmakers had a rational basis for doing so.

Homosexual activists have largely persuaded the courts and the mainstream media that their sexual practices are quite innocuous and therefore pose no threat to society.  But the authors of a new study recently published in Psychological Reports reach a very different conclusion, uncovering disturbing evidence that homosexuality entails serious malign consequences, at least as serious as prostitution or illegal drug use.

Parsing national survey data collected in 1996 by the National Centers for Disease Control, the authors of the new study adduce strong evidence that in the "disturbances of public health and social order" for which they were responsible, "those who engaged in homosexuality were similar to those who used illegal drugs, participated in prostitution, or regularly smoked."  In other words, the researchers limned "similar patterns" for these groups (homosexuals, prostitutes, illegal drug users, and regular smokers) in "criminality, dangerousness, use of illegal substances, problems with substance abuse, mental health, and health costs." 

More specifically, just as criminality, drunk driving, poor psychological well-being, and reliance upon health care or addiction treatments were more common among prostitutes, drug users, and heavy smokers than among abstinent peers, even so all of these threats to public order and solvency showed up much more among homosexuals than among heterosexuals.  More specifically, homosexuals were significantly more likely than heterosexuals to have been booked for a crime (p<0.01), more likely to have driven under the influence of alcohol or drugs during the previous year (p<0.05), more likely to report a mental health problem (p<0.05), more likely to have visited the emergency room for an illness or accident during the previous year (p<0.10), and more likely to have received treatment or counseling for drugs or alcohol during the previous year (p<0.05).

The researchers noted some difficulty in statistically comparing the disturbances of public health and social order found among homosexuals with those found among prostitutes, drug users, and heavy smokers because homosexuals often showed up in the comparison groups.  Compared with heterosexuals, homosexuals were "more apt to divert themselves with illegal drugs, more apt to have ever smoked daily, and more apt to have been involved in prostitution." 

The authors of the new study acknowledge that "those championing homosexual rights" have asserted that "there are no real differences between those who indulge [in homosexual activity] and those who do not."  But after studying the available data, the researchers conclude that these activists have been "denied empirical support" by the respondents to the national behavioral surveys.  In contrast, in these surveys "traditionalist assertions about the personal and social harms associated with homosexual activity received support."